


Thicker Than Code

by leporidae



Category: Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Cartoon 2018)
Genre: Family Fluff, Fights, Gen, Hypnotism, I have no idea how to tag this fic tbh, Mad Dogz Zine, Rivalry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:08:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27618833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leporidae/pseuds/leporidae
Summary: Donnie and his brothers will always be a team, regardless of what obstacles they encounter, their petty squabbles, and their wild differences of opinion. Though a little extra peace and quiet to tinker would always be welcome, Donnie begrudgingly can’t imagine life without them.How ironic, then, that his own family is about to become his downfall.
Relationships: Donatello & April O'Neil (TMNT)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 60





	Thicker Than Code

**Author's Note:**

> I had the absolute pleasure of writing this fic for the [Mad Dogz Zine](https://twitter.com/MadDogzZine), a tribute to Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that released back in December. 
> 
> The zine itself is free and downloadable from the twitter page and the show is absolutely incredible, with a dedicated and talented fanbase. Being able to contribute to this project was awesome (and a challenge to live up to how much energy the show has haha) and the final product was full of passion, so please do check it out if you have any interest.

Donatello, self-proclaimed gadgeteer extraordinaire and _unquestionably_ the handsomest of his brothers, knows more acutely than anyone that he’s been blessed with insurmountable genius. 

He also knows that, as cheesy and antithetical to coolness as it sounds, his genius means nothing without his family to back him up.

Time and time again, Donnie has lapsed into selfish behaviors, tempted by the forbidden fruits of technology and popularity. But each time he has strayed from the light, his brothers and April have been there to steer him back on track, to remind him of what is truly important. And it isn’t video games, fancy gadgets, or _admittedly_ beautiful purple jackets. 

(Rest in pieces, fallen jacket warrior. You will be missed.)

Donnie and his brothers will always be a team, regardless of what obstacles they encounter, their petty squabbles, and their wild differences of opinion. Though a little extra peace and quiet to tinker would always be welcome, Donnie begrudgingly can’t imagine life without them.

How ironic, then, that his own family is about to become his downfall. 

* * *

The day starts like any other: Leo is skateboarding while Mikey laughs at memes on his phone and Donnie tinkers at his desk. Amidst the chaos, Raph — the responsible older brother running errands for his lazy family — returns to their hideout with pizza, and the four set aside their individual tasks, setting up the projector to watch their chosen mindless entertainment of the day. Today’s selection is a montage of basketball trick shots, courtesy of Leo. Tomorrow it will be Mikey’s turn to pick, and Donnie secretly prays his younger brother won’t choose silly home videos about cats again. Just the thought of hearing one more pathetic meow of a kitten falling off a table makes his eye twitch.

Everything is normal — as normal as life can be for four turtle brothers living in the sewer.

Alas, their ‘normal’ never lasts very long.

When the projector flickers on, Leo’s basketball montage is nowhere to be found, simply a blank screen projected onto the wall in front of them. The TV room is filled with loud, gravelly white noise. Donnie winces at the grating sound, fingers curling into his palms, and Mikey runs his hands down his cheeks with a melodramatic moan.

Leo frowns. “Hey, what gives? I swear it was working earlier.”

“Maybe I just gotta hit it,” Raph muses. “Get the loose screws to pop back in place. Or something.”

Donnie steps between Raph and the projector frantically. “ _Uh,_ that’s a no from me, Raphael. I shudder to think what damage you could inflict on this poor machine with your — all offense — _less-than-delicate_ touch.”

“Hey, guys?” Mikey pipes up before Raph can retort. “Are you seeing this too? It’s, um, really weird.”

In unison, the brothers glance up. What had originally been a blank screen has morphed into an amorphous blob of writhing static. _Purple_ static. The best color of static, of course, in Donnie’s humble opinion — but also the most dangerous color. And the longer Donnie looks, the drowsier he feels, as though his brain is going into screensaver mode. Hurriedly, he flips his goggles over his eyes, filtering out the adverse effects of the signal.

His mind clears instantly, and the reality of the situation crashes down upon him. Someone — or one particular group of _someones_ — is using subliminal messaging to hypnotize him and his brothers; and there’s only one technology-obsessed, Donnie-hating, admittedly-stylish squad that could be the culprits.

 _The Purple Dragons — my sworn arch-nemeses. This signal_ has _to be coming from them._

“Guys, don’t look at it,” Donnie says, but it’s too late. In eerie synchronicity, his brothers’ shoulders go slack, lifeless as S.H.E.L.L.D.O.N. in sleep mode. As Donnie takes a tentative step away from the projector, Leo, Raph, and Mikey turn to him with blank expressions and cruel grins, unsheathing their mystic weapons in slow motion. Eyes still trained on Donnie, they stagger forward with an irregular gait reminiscent of the straight-to-VHS classic ‘Jupiter Jim and the Rise of the Space Zombies’.

Donnie gulps. “Okay, so… you looked at it. Noted.”

All at once, his brothers leap forward. Donnie barely manages to flee the room in a panicked scramble of limbs, dodging the slash of Leo’s sabre and the crash of Raph’s fists. Donnie isn’t the most physically well-endowed of his family. In a one-on-one fight with any of his siblings, victory is dubious at best. Faced with a three-on-one fight, in which his hypnotized brothers have no moral qualms about hurting him, he may as well throw in the towel before it even begins. 

_I have to save them,_ Donnie thinks frantically. _I can’t let the Purple Dragons win. But I’m going to need some backup, or I’ll get thrashed before I get the chance._

He pulls out his phone and sends the fastest text he can manage while running for his life, and he hopes his desperate plea to Sherlock.Corn (a.k.a April O’Neil, trusty friend and sidekick) will not be left on read. Luckily, his hypnotized brothers are still a bit shaky on their feet, clambering over one another in a mad dash to reach him, and Donnie manages to put some space between them as they struggle. With one last burst of speed he dives through the hatch of his laboratory and slams the door shut, his brothers still banging on the wall outside. It won’t be long before they use their mystic weapons to bust through. While the steel door holds, he has to think of a solution, some way to use the Purple Dragons’ brainwashing against them.

“How’s it feel to lose, _Othello von Ryan?”_

Kendra’s smarmy face blinks into view on every wall-mounted screen, her annoying lackeys peering out from behind her. With a growl of frustration, Donnie snatches his laptop — the only unplugged, unhacked piece of machinery — and dives behind his desk. His laboratory is bathed in neon purple light from the Purple Dragons’ hacked video feed, which would honestly make for an excellent aesthetic in any other situation.

“You’ll have to tell me that yourself when _you_ lose,” Donnie snaps in reply, though it’s not one of his better comebacks. To be fair, he’s currently attempting to hack through Kendra’s virus while his brainwashed brothers bang on the hatch of his laboratory in a frenzy, out for his blood. It takes focus and effort to be seamlessly quippy, an underappreciated skill he’s honed for years.

“How’s that going for you?” Kendra jeers as Jeremy and Jase cackle on cue like the spineless goons they are. “No need to answer that. I’ve pretty much already won.” With a saccharine smile, she waves pettily at Donnie. “See you never, Donatello.”

The video feed cuts out.

Donnie hears a sharp _crack_ as the wall behind him begins to splinter, and he skims faster through the lines of code, desperately looking for any sort of loophole in Kendra’s virus. He can’t die here, not when he still has so much left on his bucket list: founding the Donatello Hall of Fame for Science and Technology, inducting a marble statue of himself at said Hall of Fame, converting the penthouse of a hundred-story building into his lair, in which he would walk around in nothing but a silk purple bathrobe and shades, winning a Nobel Prize for engineering, winning a second Nobel Prize just for being _that_ awesome —

Raph’s fist, crackling with electricity, punches through the wall at the entrance to his lab.

Perhaps he should have taken a mystic weapon after all.

“Alas, such is the downfall of my superior intellect — quashed by my unfathomable hubris,” Donnie bemoans out loud, because what’s the point of keeping it to himself anymore? At least the last thing he’ll hear before he dies will be his own beguiling voice.

“Donnie? Is that you?!”

“April!” he shouts back, and the absurdity of contemplating his own death strikes him. He won’t give up, not when there’s still so much to do and so much tech to build, so many inventions to watch malfunction in glittery explosions. “Thank goodness. I was beginning to think you had misinterpreted my meticulously coded message.”

She materializes before him with a proudly grinning Mayhem on her shoulder, rolling her eyes even as she dodges the slash of Leo’s sword. “You mean, the one that said ‘HELP’ in all caps and nothing else?”

“Yes, yes, that’s the one. I’m sensing sarcasm, which is a bit unfair, seeing as I myself am the master of sarc—”

“ _Donnie_!”

The warning is appreciated, and Donnie manages at the last moment — with a rather undignified squeal — to duck as Raph throws one of his computer monitors across the room. It hits the opposite wall and shatters, which coincidentally is also how Donnie’s poor heart feels watching his precious work get trashed.

“Ugh, I heard everything. Why does Kendra even still want to mess with you?” April grumbles, swatting Mikey away with her bat as painlessly as she can manage. “Can’t that girl get over herself? What a creep.”

“To be fair, if I was my own rival, I would also be constantly plagued by the knowledge that someone of my intellect was out there, challenging my throne.”

April snorts. “Yeah, yeah. But what are we gonna do? It’s not like we can just reprogram them!”

“Reprogram—” The metaphorical Einsteinian lightbulb of epiphany switches on. “April O’Neil,” Donnie says solemnly, “you might actually be — and this means a lot coming from me — a genius!” The gears in his mind begin to whir with a flash of manic inspiration. “The Purple Dragons may have the power of evil on their side, but I know my brothers better than they ever could. Could you distract those lovable idiots for a few minutes while I concoct my brilliant solution?”

“Just me and Mayhem against three of my hypnotized friends coming at me with their freaky mystic weapons?” April grins, grip tightening on the bat in her hands. “No sweat. I’ve gotchu covered.”

“This is why we make a great team,” Donnie says. “I’m the brains, and you’re the—” When April glowers at him, he cuts himself off with a shrug. “The… other brains.”

“Just get on it!”

As April leaps back into the fray, dodging the others’ attacks with the help of Mayhem’s teleportation, Donnie can’t help but scoff at the task before him. The Purple Dragons may have brainwashed his brothers temporarily, but they don’t understand their disadvantage: nobody knows Donnie’s brothers like Donnie.

What sort of subliminal messaging will bring his brothers back to their senses? He pulls together clips from Lou Jitsu and Jupiter Jim movies, the sound effects from the video games they’d played together as children, the commercial jingles that got stuck in Mikey’s head for days as he sung them around the lair… It won’t take much to get them to remember who they are. 

Kendra and her crew have lost this little game before it even began.

With a smirk, Donnie uploads the anti-hypnosis mixtape to his server and adjusts its setting to _OVERRIDE._

The monitors displaying Kendra’s purple static black out in unison, and the discordant cacophony of nostalgic noises Donnie has created pipes through his laboratory instead, wholly unpleasant to behold. Leo, Mikey, and Raph freeze where they stand, mystic weapons raised in the air. The crazed fire in their eyes gradually fades to be replaced with a look of dazed confusion as they behold destruction they don’t remember causing.

Slowly, April lowers her bat with a sigh of relief, still trembling from adrenaline as Mayhem nuzzles her shoulder.

“Did we, uh, win?” Mikey pipes up first, ever the optimist.

Donnie snorts. “Not to split hairs, my dear Michelangelo, but in fact _I_ am the one who—”

April coughs. _Loudly._

With a melodramatic sigh, Donnie pulls his disoriented brothers into a hug.

“All right, all right. Yes, _we_ won.”

Squealing with excitement, Mikey wraps his arms around Donnie a bit too tightly. “Aw, look, guys! Donnie’s being huggy!”

“I am absolutely not _huggy,”_ Donnie mutters, a bit embarrassed, but he doesn’t let go, even as April laughs and joins the already-stifling embrace.

Once again, the power of family has reigned supreme.

_And that, Kendra, is something you will never understand._


End file.
